DEEP DIVE

Mollie Goldstein has two films showing at Sundance Film Festival, Hot Water and In the Blink of an Eye – she runs through her process for both…

At what point in the process did the films truly “find themselves” in the edit and how different did they look from the versions you imagined on set?

With Hot Water, I came in after the shoot and after Ramzi (Bashour, the director) had cut together the first 40 minutes or so. It was a unique opportunity in that I got to see the tone and the performances before I read the script, so I never had the time to imagine the film any differently – which I loved. So many times in an editing interview you’re guessing at what the challenges and strengths of the project will be, and when I met with Ramzi and his producers (Max Walker-Silverman and Jesse Hope), I was able to speak to the cut directly. Getting to visualise the rest of the script with the first 40 minutes to tell me the baseline was a unique and really valuable opportunity.

I think In the Blink of an Eye started to find itself after our first two feedback screenings, when we took the storylines apart and looked at them individually. It was a real “aha!” moment – suddenly the sources of all the bumps that the early audiences were complaining about were completely clear to us, and in weaving the scenes back together again we were able to find new sync points and new ways for the stories to echo each other.

Was there a specific scene or sequence where the edit became the storytelling engine rather than the script or performances?

With Blink, the narrative drive of the film was really built in the edit. The script is beautiful and thoughtful, but the story is very spare; the movie is about being human, love, loss and the passage of time. The engine of the storytelling came from the sync points we could find in the storylines and the echoes we could create when weaving them together. When we could sync each character to move towards a similar goal, it created momentum in the storytelling.

Hot Water had a very natural drive to it (no pun intended): it’s about a mum (Lubna Azabal) and a son (Daniel Zolghadri) driving across the country. Ramzi and his team literally shot it on the road, so the scenery and the B-roll matched the story. The edit is where we found the rhythm of the trip and the character evolution along the way, but the journey itself was always the engine of the story.

My philosophy as an editor is that you move quickly so that you can choose exactly when to move slowly

How did you manage rhythm and pacing when balancing emotional intimacy with narrative momentum in the edit?

My philosophy as an editor is that you move quickly so that you can choose exactly when to move slowly. When you get the audience accustomed to robust forward momentum, they really pay attention when things slow down. Both the narrative momentum and the emotional intimacy are served by the contrast. The faster sections get depth and the slower sections feel earned.

How early were editorial decisions influencing other post-production elements like sound design, music, or visual effects?

On In the Blink of an Eye, there was a much bigger visual effects sequence initially planned for the end of the film. Early in the Director’s Cut, Andrew (Stanton, director) and I decided the story didn’t need it and we wanted to focus more on Kate McKinnon’s character at the very end of the film. For Hot Water, Ramzi was the composer of the film as well as the director. So he had a very improvisatory, musical approach to the edit and the two elements went hand in hand.

How did collaboration between editor and director evolve over the course of post-production, particularly when difficult cuts had to be made?

Andrew Stanton and I worked well together from the beginning, but there’s one moment that will always stick with me. Andrew was full-time in our NYC cutting room until the end of the Director’s Cut, when he had to go back to San Francisco and split his time between Toy Story 5 at Pixar and working on Blink remotely with me. There was one day while we were working remotely when I had a huge breakthrough about some feedback we had been getting and suddenly understood what was going haywire in the Coakley (Kate McKinnon) storyline. I called Andrew and really only sputtered gibberish at him – “she does this but she says that and when the thing happens you’re like, what the hell?,” etc. He said, “I don’t really understand what you’re trying to tell me, but I can hear the excitement in your voice and I trust that. So do what you want to do and then show me the cut.” It was such a beautiful moment of collaboration, and feeling so trusted and understood in the big picture while not being able to express myself in the small picture was really special.

For Blink, the biggest editorial breakthrough was definitely figuring out how powerful it is when characters in each time period were experiencing the same thing

What were the biggest technical or creative challenges you faced in post and how did your editing tools help you work through them efficiently?

Hot Water was a small, scrappy indie movie with a lot of footage shot over the course of a long road trip. There was a lot of footage and a lot of improv. I’m used to having a fulltime AE to set up script sync in Avid or line-by-lines in Premiere, and that was not in the cards on a film this size. I ended up working out a shortcut with Premiere’s transcription feature: I made a sequence of all the footage for the scene, had Premiere transcribe it, and then used the subtitle feature to automatically subtitle the “all footage” sequence. This let me jump from title to title and search the text when I was looking for a specific line. It saved me from spending all my time hunting through dailies when I wanted something specific and was shockingly fast and simple to set up.

Blink was a much more conventional Avid workflow, but we were working with teams all over the country. Andrew was in San Francisco, Thomas Neuman was composing in LA, Weta FX was doing our opening sequence in New Zealand, and we finished sound and color in Toronto while the VFX producer, supervisor and editor were coordinating the final VFX shots in NY. So Clearview, Slack, and all the other post-pandemic remote editing tools were the only way we could make it all work.

Looking back, what’s one editorial decision you now see as pivotal to the film’s final emotional impact?

For Blink, the biggest editorial breakthrough was definitely figuring out how powerful it is when characters in each time period were experiencing the same thing. By syncing the moments of death, birth, and other universal human experiences, we could triple the emotional impact. This was really the biggest impact the edit process had on the final film (and also it was so fun – I think there were approximately one million ways to cut this movie and we tried approximately 999,999 of them. It sounds exhausting, but it was really an editing dream to have so many options and be free to play).

In Hot Water, we spent a lot of time refining the arc of Layal (Lubna Azabal). She makes a big decision at the end of the film, and we had to make sure that it felt like the emotional journey of the movie was leading to that point. So we discovered in editorial that we had kind of a “cheat code” – B-roll with phone call audio could slot in and fill out Layal’s emotional journey and was a way to build new moments in post.